Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games posted a look at me as an IGDA Board candidate, and also asked me some questions about my candidacy. I’m answering them here.

Why run now?

I decided to kick off my campaign for board almost a year ago, spurred by the Mike Capps debacle. Following that incident (and then the whole Tim Langdell thing) confidence in the IGDA reached an all-time low. I wanted to see better leadership on the IGDA Board, and when Coray Seifert said he was surprised I hadn’t run for Board yet things just clicked for me. Jason Della Rocca’s departure from the IGDA made it clear that the organization was hitting an inflection point, and I decided that running at this critical time in the org’s existence was the best thing I could do as a member.

Furthermore, the Boston IGDA chapter is at an excellent place right now. While running the chapter is not a simple task, we have established a workflow that lets the chapter organizers (of which Scott is one) fairly easily put together our monthly meetings and handle the website and job board. This means I’m comfortable stepping back somewhat from my local chapter duties to focus on global IGDA matters.

You say that the biggest issue facing us as developers is establishing our status as professionals, and that fixing this is a long-term thing.  What can the IGDA be doing in the short term to address things you note as symptomatic of this – like Quality of Life?

I think the IGDA is doing all that it can right now to improve QoL. Emphasis on the word “can” — the big problem is that we get a huge chunk of our revenue from studio memberships, so doing something pragmatic like instituting a program where studios are rated for QoL probably isn’t economically feasible for the organization. Even something like offering a certification program where we give a QoL Seal to companies willing to undergo a kind of inspection isn’t really feasible. This is another reason for my chapter-centric platform: strong chapters means strong outreach to individual members. I am hoping that by shoring up the chapters, we can get the IGDA to a place where we can drop our studio affiliate program and/or it wouldn’t kill the org to have a bunch of studios drop their membership if we did something they didn’t like.

If not covered by the above, what do you think the IGDA’s role in the industry-wide Quality of Life discussions should be?

I believe we should be certifying studios somehow. As mentioned above, I think voluntary inspections for companies that are confident they have good QoL would be a start. I believe such a program would be possible to do given the IGDA’s resources. We wouldn’t be pointing out the bad places to work but at least the good ones would be highlighted.

You note that you are up on the cutting edge communication technologies, and can help the IGDA with this.  What, if anything, do you see as poor about the IGDA’s communications practices right now, and how specifically would you improve them?

I wrote about this to some extent in my blog post “Transparency of the IGDA Board” back in April. Things have improved since then. There’s now an IGDA Board blog where Board members post occasional updates about what they’re doing. In particular I was impressed with Marc Deloura’s recent post about IGDA representation at a White House meeting. I didn’t know we had people there, and it was great to be informed of that in my daily RSS reading! We now have a Twitter account for the org and one for the Board as well.

While there has been improvement, we’re now facing the next step that is common to all organizations that adopt Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc: it’s easy to use them as a broadcast tool, but it can be challenging to manage the communities around them. We need to use them as tools to converse with our members. I also feel that our forum policies leave a lot to be desired (there’s been a lot of blocking/banning of posts which is generally not great practice).

Finally, there’s the issue of the website. We spent many tens of thousands of dollars over many years and what we have right now is unacceptable. I realize that a lot of those resources were spent by an almost entirely different Board and different IGDA staff, but I would like to see an IGDA website that I can link people to without also including a cringing apology. I don’t know exactly how I’d go about fixing the website. I need more insight into our relationship with our contractors, budget, and so on before I can make any concrete plans there.

Can you please talk about the big issues the IGDA itself faces as an organization right now?  What do you think is the most pressing one, and how would you work to resolve it?

I think our biggest organizational issues are fixing the website and transitioning away from our dependence on studio memberships. I discuss both above. If I had to pick one as the most pressing, it would be the studio membership issue. Weaning ourselves off of that money is probably going to take several years. I’d consider myself successful if this happens by the time my term would finish (2013).

Do you think the IGDA’s dependence on studio sponsorships for money is a bad thing?  If yes, what will you do to begin changing this?  If no, why not?

Yes, and I answer the “why” and “how” questions above.

(It’s official — I have been nominated and will be running for IGDA Board. Elections open soon, and that means the candidate statements go up on the IGDA website soon. Since my statement is done and submitted, I figured I would post it here. It’s based off a post I made here some months ago.)

“How will the IGDA tangibly benefit me as a developer?”

Prospective members ask this question time and time again. Often, we struggle to answer. Sometimes we mention one of our excellent Special Interest Groups to convince a developer to join, or we use IGDA events like the Leadership Forum and the Global Game Jam to show what the IGDA does for its community. Unfortunately, sometimes these groups and events alone fail to persuade potential IGDA members, and we lose the opportunity to expand our organization.

As an IGDA Board member, my number one priority will be to strengthen local chapters worldwide by making them a vital part of their local game development scene.

I’ve been an organizer of the Boston IGDA Chapter since 2006, and I became its president in April 2009. I’ve worked to grow the chapter, turning it into a force in the local community. When local developers ask me to describe the benefits of IGDA membership, I can respond with a list of tangible benefits provided by our chapter:

• A place for networking, with 100-200 people at our monthly meetings, grown from 30 people in 2005
• A monthly speaker on game development topics
• A news feed for relevant local events
• An active job board
• Community coordination around large-scale events (discounts to local conferences, placing our members on panel discussions, etc.)
• Political coordination around issues of game censorship legislation, tax credits, net neutrality
• A sense of belonging to a real community of local game developers

If every IGDA chapter worldwide could provide their members with a similar list of services, individual developers would immediately see the benefits that the IGDA brings them. Furthermore, they would see opportunities to volunteer on a local level, which would lead to greater member engagement with the IGDA.

Member engagement and communication on a chapter level are the foundation of the IGDA’s ability to advocate for game developers. Imagine if all of our chapters were strong; the IGDA could respond to hot-button QoL issues as they are raised by recommending that all of its chapters participate in a theme month, where the topic of discussion would be issues surrounding QoL. We could take notes from all the meetings worldwide and compile them on the IGDA Wiki. Such notes would be of value to the IGDA’s ongoing QoL efforts, giving the IGDA a better handle on where developers stand on the issue, and the meetings themselves would almost certainly cause volunteers to step forward and join our QoL initiatives.

I believe in the future of the IGDA — I’ve been a member since 2003 and it is obvious that we are doing more as an organization today than ever before. Yet there is much room for improvement, not just on the chapter level, but on issues of transparency, budget, and election process and policy. I’ll end this statement by encouraging you as a member to research each and every candidate on this page: it’s in your hands to elect the Board you want, so don’t throw away this opportunity to make a real difference.

Volunteer contributions:

• President, IGDA Boston Chapter, AKA Boston Post Mortem (2009-present)
• Coordinator, IGDA Boston Chapter, AKA Boston Post Mortem (2006-2009)
• Technology Co-Officer, Game Education SIG (2007-present)
• Member, Special Member Meeting Task Force (August 2009)

“How will the IGDA tangibly benefit me as a developer?”

Prospective members ask IGDA volunteers that question time and time again. Often, we struggle to answer. Sometimes we mention one of our excellent Special Interest Groups to convince a developer to join. Or we use IGDA events like the Leadership Forum and the Global Game Jam to show what the IGDA does for its community. Unfortunately, sometimes these groups and events alone fail to persuade potential IGDA members, and we lose the opportunity to expand our organization.

I am a chapter coordinator for Boston Post Mortem (the IGDA Boston chapter), so when local developers ask me to describe the benefits of IGDA membership, I can respond with a list of tangible benefits provided by our local chapter. The Boston Post Mortem gives its members:

• A place for networking (~180 people at our monthly meetings, most of whom are professional developers)
• A monthly speaker on game development topics
• A news feed for relevant local events
• An active job board
• Community coordination around large-scale events (discounts to local conferences, placing our members on panel discussions, etc.)
• Mobilization against, for example, game censorship legislation on the city/state level, and mobilization to pass legislation that would benefit our industry
• A sense of belonging to a real community of local game developers

I contend that if every local IGDA chapter worldwide could provide their members with a similar list of services, individual developers would immediately see how the IGDA benefits its members and join the organization.

The presence of active, thriving IGDA chapters all over the world would provide a way for developers to become more engaged in the IGDA’s activities. Developers involved with dynamic local chapters will have more incentive to participate in SIGs, committees, and other IGDA events. Active local chapters also allow the IGDA to communicate with its members more effectively. An email from a trusted local chapter coordinator about a new SIG or IGDA issue has a personal touch a newsletter from the IGDA Board lacks.

In addition, the increased member engagement and improved communication of an active chapter increases the IGDA’s ability to act as an advocate for game developers. The IGDA did a commendable job of resolving the EA Mythic credits controversy last year, but imagine a hypothetical situation where we had a network of strong chapters in place during that controversy. The IGDA could have recommended that all of its chapters participate in a theme month, where the topic of discussion at that month’s meeting would be issues surrounding credits in the game industry. We could have taken notes from all the meetings worldwide and compiled them on the IGDA Wiki. Such notes would have been invaluable to the IGDA Credit Standards Committee, and the meetings themselves would almost certainly have caused volunteers to step forward and join that committee. Perhaps this effort would have drawn attention to and catalyzed action around crediting issues in local communities.

If elected to the IGDA Board, I will make the growth of local IGDA chapters worldwide my primary issue. I will serve as a mentor for local chapter coordinators around the world. I will use my experience expanding and running the Boston chapter to help chapter coordinators meet their specific needs. I will work with chapter coordinators to develop a written guide to starting and maintaining an IGDA chapter. And I will use my position on the Board to ensure that relevant IGDA activities are communicated to local chapter coordinators, who can then relay that information to their membership as they see fit.